Need help - no mods in over a year

Greetings - haven't been on the site in a very long time. Our wii has sat largely unused for over a year except for a few times here and there due to ipods and ipads entering the house. My son has come of age to be able to play modern warfare games, played at a friend's house, and suddenly we have interest again. Here's the problem -- I have most of my games on an external drive, and it's not working.

I'm on version 4.2U, softmodded, older white wii. Using cfg USB loader. I assumed the problem was with the external drive. I did a thorough chkdsk, and found no errors. So I thought that maybe I needed to update the cfg loader, but when I try to go into it, it crashes.

1. Is there a way to update the loader software without going into the channel? It's been so long since the last time I messed with hacking it that I honestly don't remember what I did?
2. If no way to upgrade just the loader, should I go ahead and update the wii to 4.3 and start over with modmii? Are there advantages to going to 4.3? The newest game I have is COD Black Ops.
3. If I need to update to 4.3, can I just let it update over normal system update, or will that mess things up for me? I know that bootmii is installed, and I would do a NAND backup before I did the update, but just didn't know if there was an easier way.

I have done some reading - not just trolling or looking for the easy way out, but I don't have time to read for hours before I even begin the process. Any help that you can give will be appreciated.